Monthly archives for May, 2016

Never a top rung star Laraine Day nevertheless had a long and successful career. She was the screen embodiment of refined glamour — a bigtime looker — sufficiently commonsensical to be brought home to meet mother.

Joe thinks one of her best films was 1940’s Foreign Correspondent. Certainly it boasted of the best credentials, although Day should be remembered as well for skillfully playing a range of parts ranging from — virtuous society girls to girl Fridays to psychotic murderesses to possible ax murder victims. Her most memorable roles took place in, of all things, medical settings.

Her both-feet-touch-the-ground appeal at least partially explains by why she spent so much of her 49-year career appearing on various tv series. Her offscreen life took a marital detour which had the effect of crowning Day as an informal queen of a sport defined as America’s national pastime.

Ok, let’s see how much you remember (she died in 2007 at age 87) about Laraine Day. As usual, questions today and answers tomorrow. Here we go:

1) Question: Day’s career in the movies started in 1937, and she was quickly signed to a contract by which one of the following studios? a) MGM; b) 20th Century Fox; c) Walter Wanger Productions; or d) RKO.

2) Question: Laraine Day was not her real name. Why did she change the name she was born with? a) Because she was embarrassed about her ethnic back round; b) She was following a studio dictate; c) Just for the hell of it; or d) none of the above.

3) Question: Which one of the following did Day NOT costar with? a) Joel McCrea; b) Ronald Colman; c) Cary Grant; or d) Gary Cooper.

4) Question: Day was a big hit as nurse ‘Mary Lamont’ in the ‘Dr. Kildare’ series of movies. How many of then did she costar in? a) 15; b) seven; c) 10; or d) three.

5) Question: Day caught a break when she unexpectedly landed a key part in CharlesVidor’s 1940 melodrama, My Son, My Son! Which one of the following did she replace in the cast? a) Hedy Lamarr; b) Miriam Hopkins; c) Sylvia Sidney; or d) Frances Dee.

6) Question: Day claimed a family religious back round that was considered unusual in Hollywood. What was it? a) She came from a prosperous Mormon family; b) She was an Orthodox Jew; c) She was an avowed and avid atheist; or d) She was a Shaker.

7) Question: Day was famously married to which one of the following baseball notables? a) Branch Rickey; b) Del Webb; c) Leo Durocher; or d) Phil Rizzuto.

8) Question: As noted Day is well remembered for her role in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller, Foreign Correspondent. Which role does she play in the picture? a) A floozy who romances lead Joel McCrea; b) A politician’s daughter; c) A traitorous cleaning lady who betrays secrets; d) The girlfriend of British journalist George Sanders.

9) Question: Which of the following were Day’s principal costars in the ‘Dr. Kildare’ movies? a) Lew Ayres; b) Lionel Barrymore; c) Alma Kruger; or d) all of the above.

10) Question: Day loved baseball until the day she died. a) True; or b) False?

Today is Memorial Day when the nation officially pauses to honor the men and women who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice in service of the U.S. military. For us, there are few better ways to mark the occasion than by another look-see of perhaps the finest, unheralded war movie ever made.

First, a few words from Michael Caine (a dogface who fought in the Korean War): British war films were always about officers; American films were about enlisted men.

Caine is right, and no movie better illustrates his observation better than A Walk In The Sun, made by 20th Century Fox, directed by Lewis Milestone and released in January 1945.

The movie has an all-star cast of character actors (George Tynes, Herbert Rudley, Sterling Holloway, Huntz Hall, Norman Lloyd, Steve Brodie and a very young-looking Lloyd Bridges) aided by bigger stars, Dana Andrews, John Ireland and Richard Conte — all portraying dog faces. A hapless lieutenant’s face is blown away in the movie’s opening scenes, after which not a single officer appears in the rest of the movie.

A Walk In The Sun tracks an Army infantry platoon in the 1943 Italian campaign from a Salerno beach landing through to an assault on a bridge and a rural farmhouse crawling with German machine gunners.

Note: The mission succeeds at a considerable loss of life despite the fact that there is no certainty at all that the capture of the farmhouse and the destruction of the bridge was of any strategic or military significance whatever.

There are bursts of action but equally emphasized are the personality quirks of each GI, even their interior monologues. Ireland’s Pfc Windy Crave, for example, mentally composes letters from the battlefield to a female cousin. (We know this because we hear his voiceover narration of what he is composing.)

The movie is based on a book written by Harry Brown, originally published in 1944 by Alfred A Knopf Inc., and reprinted in 1998 by First Bison Books, Univ. of Nebraska Press. When it first came out, the book was highly praised as being right on target. So is the movie.

The long-suffering soldiers had a job to do and they did it, so don’t think too hard about how necessary the orders might or might not have been. The narrator was perfect: BurgessMeredith.

FRANKS SAYS: I have been smitten with A Walk In The Sun for decades now (I am not entirely sure I did not catch the movie upon its original theatrical release).

I love the poetic touches spoken in the movie by John Ireland and in the book by the sergeant portrayed in the film version by Dana Andrews, one of my very favorite actors. The combat action seems credible to me, and so does most of the profanity-free GI talk, albeit mild-mannered by today’s screen standards, from screenwriter Robert Rossen

HERE’S JOE: As coauthor of The Films of World War II (The Citadel Press, 1973), Joe surveyed nearly 100 wartime titles and found that A Walk in the Sun hit the core of what must have actually happened in countless small encounters on battlefields wherever fighting men met the enemy.

“(The film) concerns itself intimately and in close-up with the men involved, with their thoughts and feelings. It was a compelling and honest account of humans caught in the, mill of an inhuman situation.” Seeing this film — what better Memorial Day tribute?

Yesterday we noted with sadness the death of the last living stalwart from the classic film Casablanca,Madeleine LeBeau.

The film is notable for many things, not least of which is that it featured many character actors, who, like LeBeau, had fled Europe to find refuge in Hollywood.

Director Michael Curtiz, who had been in the States from the mid 1920s had worked in his native Hungary and in Vienna. He knew of the work of many of these actors and cast them in Casablanca.

Of course some of the films leading (and credited) luminaries, such as Paul Henried, Peter Lorre, S. K. Sakall, Curt Bois, and Conrad Veidt, were well known to film audiences by 1943. But the film is peppered with lesser known actors, who once were BIG stars in Europe, who were happy to have uncredited bits in the film.

They include: Lotte Palfi, Ludwig Stossel and IlkaGrunig (as the Austrian couple who are going to America; see above). Wolfgang Zilzer, (Palfi’s husband) was the man without a valid passport shot running away from the police. Trudie Berliner was the woman at the baccarat table asking if Rick would have a drink with her.

Marcel Dalio, who had been a huge star in France, and was at the time married to the teenage LeBeau, was, of course, Emil, the croupier. Helmut Dantine was the young Bulgarian at the tables trying to win enough for an exit visa.

Some film historians contend that a great deal of the emotional impact of the film is attributed to the European exiles. Many of them were Jewish, and if they got work in films at all were often cast as Nazis. As was Hans Twardowski in this film.

You are looking at (above) what the French culture minister has proclaimed forever the faceof French resistance against the World War II German occupation of France. Do you recognize it and her?

Among the dozens of motion picture refugees who fled from the Nazis and found a home in Hollywood, she was the actress who made the largest impression by doing so little. It wasn’t that I was cut out, it was because they kept changing the script, and each time they changed it, I had less of a part, she complained about her mesmerizing classic film moment.

Our subject — Madeleine Lebeau, who died on May 1 in Spain at age 92 — played Humphrey Bogart’s spurned girlfriend in 1942’s Casablanca. You know, the floozy who so passionately joins in the singing of La Marseillaise as an emotional counterpunch to the smug German officers gathered in Rick’s Cafe Americain.

It’s a great Hollywood moment, and one The New York Times summarizes nicely in its Lebeau obit.

In one of the film’s pivotal scenes, Nazi officers in the cafe begin singing the patriotic song ‘Watch On The Rhine,’ where upon the Czech resistance leader (Paul Henreid) orders the house band to strike up the French national anthem.

One by one, the bar’s patrons rise and join in, drowning out the Germans. As the song nears its stirring finale, the camera closes in on (Lebeau), her face lit with patriotic fervor, tears streaming from her eyes as she sings.

At the song’s conclusion, the camera swings toward her again as she shouts a defiant ‘Vive la France! Vive la democratie.’

That was it, the entire scene. Anyone who has seen Casablanca is not likely to forget it.

Lebeau was born in a suburb of Paris in 1923. After a desultory career in European features, she departed for Hollywood in 1939.

At the time she was married to French actor Marcel Dalio, who famously played the croupier at Rick’s — you know, the one who hands local police Lt. Louis Renault (ClaudeRains) his winnings simultaneously with the official’s proclamation that he was “shocked, shocked” to discover gambling going on at the Cafe.

Lebeau was just 19 when she was cast for her Casablanca appearance. Little did she realize she would achieve cinematic immortality with just this one scene. Adieu, Madeleine.

Answer to yesterday’s question about Clark Gable and friends: Our DoubleDating quartet photographed out on the town included Gable on the right, actor Gilbert Roland and then wife, actress Constance Bennett, on the left. The older-looking woman next to Gable was actually his wife (No. 2 of 5 Gable spouses), Maria Franklin Langham. (More on Gable’s marriages in coming blogs.)

Although he excelled in a wide range of film noir movies, he was equally adept — if not more so — in westerns (see above). Who can forget his extraordinary performance as no-illusions bounty hunter ‘Deke Thornton’ in 1969’s The Wild Bunch.

Ryan had a long and productive career, and in some respects the roles got better as he got older. Still, he lamented until the end that he was constantly being offered nothing but “Goddamed ‘B’ pictures.” Ryan was too hard on himself. His career offers a profusion of memorable pictures — A-list and otherwise.

Let’s get to the answers to our Robert Ryan quiz. As usual, scroll down to the blog below to refresh yourselves about the questions. Here we go:

1) Answer: Ryan’s career took off after his riveting portrayal of an anti-Semitic nasty in a) 1947’s Crossfire. The picture against all odds was a big hit, and Ryan was established. So much so that he was nominated for an Oscar in best supporting actor category for his performance. The bad news: to a large degree Ryan was then typecast as a mentally unbalanced villain in need of anger management.

2) Answer: In 1949’s The Set-Up, Ryan plays an over-the-hill boxer who runs afoul of the mob because he does NOT take a dive. This is an excellent movie with Ryan showing off his (c) athletic form to great advantage — a rare example of a classic movie actor not appearing ridiculous playing a professional pugilist. Ryan, a boxing champ in both college and in the U.S. Marines, was perfectly qualified for his leading role

3) Answer: As mentioned above, Ryan’s Oscar nomination was for Crossfire. He lost out to winner Edmund Gwenn for Miracle on 34th Street.

5) Answer: a) True. A native of Chicago, Ryan attended Dartmouth College where he studied theater. He fancied himself a writer and harbored ambitions in that direction. But the Great Depression intruded, and Ryan turned to acting to pay the bills.

6) Answer: b) False. Ryan made The Wild Bunch in 1969, four years before his death of lung cancer. The year he died, however, he appeared with pal Lee Marvin in a big screen version of Eugene O’Neill’s marvelous play, The Iceman Cometh. Ryan knew at the time that his performance would be his last, and it’s a beauty.

7) Answer: Ryan did NOT appear with c) Dan Dailey and d) Jane Powell. He teamed with Ginger Rogers in 1943’s Tender Comrade, his first big starring role. He costarred with Harry Belafonte in the superb 1959 thriller, Odds Against Tomorrow. If you haven’t seen the latter, do so immediately.

8) Answer: Ryan admired and envied c) Cary Grant. Whereas Ryan said he toiled on remote, sweaty locales sporting a two day beard when making westerns, Grant worked almost exclusively on “fabulous locations” — Monte Carlo, Paris and the Riviera.

9) Answer: b) False. Ryan married just once, in 1939 to ex-actress Jessica Cadwalader, and it lasted until her death a year before his in 1972.

When one thinks of movie stars one seldom thinks of the rugged Robert Ryan.

Why is that?

After all he starred, costarred and supported in some 90 movie and tv credits over more than three decades. No one could convey coiled, pent-up physical menace better than Ryan, who toplined some of the biggest studio productions of the late 20th century.

Anti-Semites, racists, murderous stalkers, various rancid nasties — Ryan played ’em all to frightening perfection. It all cast him in an evil mold he’d spend the rest of his professional life trying to break, notes critic-author Eddie Muller

Ryan was one of classic Hollywood’s most talented actors. He was a performer of many professional and person contradictions — and for all his onscreen menace was very much the thinking man’s favorite. He is high on our list.

How much do you know about Robert Ryan? We suspect not enough and thus our Monday Quiz. As usual, questions today and answers tomorrow. Here we go:

1) Question: Which of the following pictures established Ryan as one of the screens most convincing bad guys. a) 1947’s Crossfire; b) 1943’s Tender Comrade; c) 1949’s The Set-Up; or d) 1951’s On Dangerous Ground.

2) Question: 1949’s The Set-Up exploited one of Ryan’s talents rarely used onscreen. What was this special talent? a) The actor’s way of speaking French; b) His love of chess; c) His near professional skills as a boxer; d) His singing abilities.

3) Question: Ryan was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for which movie? (Hint: The title is one of the four cited in Question 1.) Who won the award?

4) Question: As an ex-Marine and a pal of John Wayne‘s, Ryan was a political conservative offscreen. a) True; or b) False?

5) Question: Although one of the screen heralded villains, Ryan was Ivy-League educated and always wanted to be a writer rather than actor? a) True; or b) False?

6) Question: When Ryan was fatally ill with lung cancer, he still managed to costar in 1969’s The Wild Bunch, one of the best westerns ever made. a) True; or b) False?

This coming July 1 will mark the 100th birthday of Olivia DeHavilland. It’s fair to speculate that she is approaching the benchmark with Parisian gusto.

Described as the last surviving female superstar of Hollywood’s Golden Age, DeHavilland decamped to the French capitol in 1955, married and then divorced her second and final husband (the late editor of superglossy Paris Match magazine), cared for her two children, basked in her French Legion d’Honneur awarded six years ago by French president Nicolas Sarkozy — and vowed to live at least another decade.

Over her some 60 years of blissful, self-willed exile far from Hollywood, DeHavilland has enjoyed a network of personal friendships. A regular reader Jeff Woodman emailed us a last fall: Friends of mine who visit Paris regularly attend services at the same church as Ms. de Havilland, and report that she gets up and reads scripture there regularly, and as recently as 6 months ago! She is truly amazing.

DeHavilland’s scripture readings on Christmas and Easter at the American Episcopal Cathedral on Avenue George V have become real events. She was also the recipient of an honorary degree in humane letters from the American University in Paris.

The French have great memories for the accomplishments of Hollywood’s classic stars, and de Havilland was feted not only for her chosen place of residency but for her popular identification as ‘Melanie Hamilton Wilkes’ in Gone With The Wind.

And, for her two best-actress Oscar roles, respectively, as an unwed mother forced to give up her son in 1946’s To EachHis Own and as the homely heroine pursued by a dazzling but devious MontgomeryClift in 1949’s The Heiress.

Hollywood, on the other hand, will always be indebted to her for being one half of the town’s most infamous sibling rivalry. The other half belonged, of course, to de Havilland’s younger sister (by 15 months), Joan Fontaine.

The de Havilland-Fontaine contretemps are STILL talked and written about. Witness the most interesting article on the two sisters in the May issue of Vanity Fair. It’s well worth a read.

The daughters of a British patent attorney, Olivia retained the family surname while Joan, who died in December of 2013 at age 96, was compelled to change hers, and borrowed her stern stepfather’s monicker.

Despite the publication of Fontaine’s acerbic 1978 memoir (No Bed Of Roses, which we have often cited), DeHavilland refuses to discuss her baby sister although she has referred to her memoir as No Shred of Truth.

Most telling is DeHavilland’s recollection of an encounter with Errol Flynn during a Hollywood revisit in 1957. This, of course, was nearly two decades after the two sparkled in The Adventures ofRobin Hood.

As the share-the-wealth bandit of Sherwood forest and his lady, ‘Maid Marian,’ both were in their Twenties when they appeared in the movie, at their physical peaks. She recalled later in her career that Flynn sometimes got erections during their love scenes. Talk about chemistry onscreen! (No wonder that Flynn and DeHavilland were paired in eight movies.)

As recounted in the Vanity Fair article, DeHavilland found that Flynn by 1957 had diminished physically. He was gaunt. His clothes didn’t fit. She remembers that she had trouble recognizing him.

Those eyes. They used to be so glinting, so full of life. And now they were dead.

Flynn expired two years later at age 50. Olivia gambols on to the century mark with verve and great style.

When we put together our May 4 blog, In Support — WALTER BRENNAN, we had some trepidation about how widely this excellent supporting actor of the Thirties, Forties and Fifties would be known by contemporary readers.

Our concern was unfounded. Judging by the email response to our blog, you guys are not only aware of but really admire Brennan’s work. Here’s reader Jeff Woodman:

I caught Brennan’s work in reverse, being first exposed as a kid to AM reruns of ‘The Real McCoys’ as the patriarch to Richard Crenna’s clan, and then, if we were lucky, in the evening at the movie houses, in Disney fare such as ‘The Gnome Mobile’ and ‘The One and Only Genuine Original Family Band.’

He was a presence not unlike William Demarist; both curmudgeonly, but Brennan was somehow twinkly whereas Demarest was often sour.

And I recall seeing a second tier borsht belt comic (a Jan Miner or a Jack Carter) open his set on Merv Griffin by saying, “I saw a movie last night that was so old Walter Brennan got the girl.” I tried to repeat it to my friends, but the frame of reference was lost on them!

Thanks, Jeff. Your friends are worse off for their loss.

Regular reader Mike Sheridan puts it this way: I can so easily categorize Walter Brennan as a true favorite. He was the humblest star in Hollywood during his days, and his days were the best.

Patricia-Nolan Hall contributes this: My introduction to Walter Brennan when I was a kid was his radio hit, ‘Old Rivers’. I was shocked (shocked!) to discover the singer was an actor. I still remember my movie buff dad shaking his head at that one.

Thanks, Patricia. “Old Rivers” was one of several recordings Brennan made in the early Sixties. On the record’s flipside was a ditty titled The Epic Ride of John Glenn. (Brennan was a lifelong political conservative.) In any case, the record was very popular, climbing to within the top 10 of the Billboard charts.

Here’s another snapshot from the Donald Gordon Collection. That’s Donald with one of his favorite people. (That’s the reason for the big grin.)

Recognize her?

She made films from the 30s through the 50s. But her greatest hit was on radio.

More — she was a California girl, born in Anaheim in 1916. Her parents divorced when she was an infant although her businessman father later left her an $11,000 trust (a nice sum in those days), which financed her early show biz ambitions.

By the time she was 18, she had appeared in a series of uncredited roles in a number movies including Laurel and Hardy’sBabes in Toyland in 1934. At 19, she made her first credited movie,”Stars Over Broadway.

Joe thinks her best performance is in 1938’s Boy Meets Girl, a Warner Brothers comedy in which she plays a pregnant waitress adopted by a pair of lazy screenwriters (James Cagney and Pat O’Brien) .

In any case, she quickly learned to capitalize on her gift for comedy as the ditzy foil and sexy straight woman. It helped enormously that she sported a knockout figure, reportedly measuring 39D-23-38. At first, she was compared to Gracie Allen. Later she was regarded as an early version of what became Marilyn Monroe.

Dumb sexpot is the part she played many times in many of her eclectic movie career. Her character in The Fabulous Joe, the 1947 comedy that costarred Walter Abel was named ‘Gorgeous Gilmore.’ (By the way, by the time she posed with Donald Gordon in the early Forties, her career was sharply on the rise.)

As mentioned, she was a huge hit on radio creating one of her best known roles, that of ‘Irma Peterson,’ prototypical fetching but boneheaded female in “My Friend Irma.” In 1949 she starred in a Paramount version so her fans could see what the dumb blonde looked like. The studio used the film to mark the movie debuts of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. (She also played “Irma” on TV, noting that back then Irma had to be a virgin for the network.)

When she was 36, she was cast opposite a 62-year-old Groucho Marx in the goofy comedy, A Girl in Every Port. In one of her strangest roles, she turned up as Marie Antoinette in Warner Brothers’ The Story of Mankind, a 1957 curiosity with an all-star cast (among others, Ronald Colman, Hedy Lamarr, Virginia Mayo, Vincent Price, Charles Coburn and, of all things, a young Dennis Hopper as Napoleon Bonaparte.)

After she appeared in a somewhat matronly role in 1962’s Mr. Hobbs Takes A Vacation (which costarred James Stewart, Maureen O’Hara and Fabian), she spent the rest of her career working in television. She died relatively young, of cancer — three months past her 56th birthday.